In Québec we have this cute little confection called un pet de sœur. It is a light flaky pastry roll layered with a buttered brown sugar sauce. VVVVery popular since Québecers have an extremely deep sweet tooth.

Pet de sœur translated into English is Nun’s fart. Not so cute anymore. Seeing as we have members from all over the world, is there any food in your country that suffers from being translated.

Near where I live (about 5 kilometres away) is a very popular food source, the Tutaekuri river. It is used by a lot people fishing for food, despite the fact that "tutaekuri" means, literally, "dogshit" - does that count?

Just translated the recipe from Spanish to English (service provided by Altavista):To beat the clear ones on the verge of sigh, to add the sugar and with surrounding movement, to add to the flour and the salt; to place in a tray previously lubricated and with encerado paper, hornee 15 minutes to 350ºF. is stripped on a cloth and it is coiled so that it takes form. To mix all the ingredients of the filling and to drain on the arm, to return to coil, to place on a tray, to cut the ends and to cover with the cheese cream softened with the mayonnaise. To decorate to the pleasure: you shiver of pimentón, gherkins or olives, etc.

well, black pudding--which is blood sausage, is one of those don't think about it foods.A lovely concoction of pig blood and pig fat! I've always thought the english dessert of "Spotted Dick" was not something i would want to eat in the dining room-- or any room.

I liked the episode of "Friends" where Rachael had two pages of her recipe book stuck together. She mixed up English trifle with shepherds pie and served it as a dessert. When she was asked why she hadn't noticed, she said that all traditional English recipes have strange combinations so it didn't occur to her that it was wrong.

I have some great Mrs Beaton recipes for "Lark Pie", take several larks, Mince Pice with real mince, so I see the point that the scriptwriters were trying to make!

She mixed up English trifle with shepherds pie and served it as a dessert

Reminds me of another language-based food mix-up (try neat url au Poisson here to pomme de terre story http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=wordplay&Number=6596), and yes, it again involved my wife's French (and no, she's not). At a dinner party she served a beautiful dessert with "crème fraiche" as a topping. This time, of course, her translation to "fresh cream" was impeccable. The dessert, unfortunately, was unpeckable. Or do I mean unspeakable? Impeachable?

. The dessert, unfortunately, was unpeckable. Or do I mean unspeakable? Impeachable?

This translation problem reminds me of the story of the French Ambassador in the late C19 who was trying to explain to the British Foreign Minister that his (the Ambassador's) wife was unable to have children, but couldn't think of the correct English word. His aides came to his aid - the first said, "His Excellency is trying to say that his wife is impregnable." The second, sensing that this was not quite le mot juste, said, "No, he means she is unbearable." The third, seeing the look of incomprehension on the Foreign Minster's face, exclaimed, "Ah, non! She is inconceivable."

Oh, I should have thought of that one, Helen!Definitely a pudding rather than a dessert in this case, methinks. But, like treacle spong [sic], an absolute delight which has to be served with custard. (Creme anglaise, belM?)

Another English "Food for Thought" is, of course, Toad in the Hole. I'd be interested to hear guesses by non-Brits as to the essential ingredients!

I once got the undivided attention of the 'Dinner Ladies' at my primary school. Dinner it may have nearly been, but ladies they were not! Picture a line of dragons, whose sole purpose in life was to stand talking to each other in shrill voices without pause. Faced with a particularly foul concoction of custard, as a very polite seven year old, I simply said in a clear voice:"No custard, thank you"and turned away down the aisle.

I had travelled several paces before the custard hit the deck with a resounding splat.

The dinner dragons were completely hushed in a single instant!

No, not all food needs to have a vile name to conjure strong responses.

>Definitely a pudding rather than a dessert<Well, Stateside, a pudding, (aside from plum pudding, which is always from a tin) is a soft custard like food, almost always a dessert. Very similar to "bird's custard", only its usually served cold, rarely warm, and never as a sauce!Cooked milk, sweetened and flavored, and thickened with corn starch (most common) or arrowroot and then cooled before serving-- and frequently topped with ersatz whipped cream.

Am I right in thinking Toad in the Hole is an egg fried (poached?) in a cut out circle of bread? But Frog Spawn? I have never even heard of that!

I know what monkey bread is, Anna! Maybe we should let itbe our secret! Once I even made alligator bread! Wonder if any of 'em know what corn pone is?

I remember being a terrified six-year-old, following my mother's instructions to tell the lunchroom ladies that I wanted a "plate lunch", not having the faintest idea of what I would get. It cost 25 cents!

>The dessert, unfortunately, was unpeckable.<Unpeckable is a new word for me, I know peckish, (desiring something to eat, is how I'd quickly define it) and presume unpeckable is in-edible. if I could figure out how to start a string i was wondering if any one else was interested in word that exist only with prefixes or suffixes.. I have never heard or read about anyone being peck or pecking (well pecking as a kiss, yes, but that is whole different meaning) and feckless, is common enough, but Feck is never heard as word in US--nor is couth, but we do have uncouth louts. and while i am sometimes discombobulated, I don't know as that i have ever been combobulated! or is this just a YART?

I cannot tell if I am English enough to speak authoritatively about this (never had school dinners - instead tiffin to school in Bombay), but if I remember rightly, toad in the hole is a concoction of suasage (toad) cooked in an egg and flour batter that rises (puffs up) into a yellowish 'thing'. When done well (which is almost never) it is fluffy, filling, lightly browned on the outside, and with juicy sausages (with tight, crunchy skins) lurking within it like treasures...

Am willing to be corrected, of course, by Jo and others who had it on a regular basis. My Mum used to cook it for me when I suffered (after a surfeit of curry) from withdrawal symptoms for English food... (Bangers and mash was another treat. Yikes...)

I am at fault. My humble apologies if I led you astray. Sometimes you have to take me - and I hasten to say a few others hereabouts - with a grain of salt, if not an entire sackful of the stuff. Unpeckable was a contrived word that seemed to fit the context. It just came into my head as I was typing. You picked up my meaning (inedible) well enough, though.

I do hear "couth" occasionally, I think mostly as a kind of tongue-in-cheek antonym. Not sure if there's a thread on AWADtalk for these sorts of words. If so, I'm sure someone will steer you towards it. The legendary tsuwm (http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/ - no commission received for free plugs) ran some underused roots a couple of weeks ago - ruly, sipid (my wife still recoils when I call her cooking that!), defatigable, delible.

Starting a thread is easy enough. Just go to a particular forum so that you see the current list of threads. Now click on the first (left) button in the row of six at the top right and simply fill in the form presented.

We do have a couple of things which are typical only to French Québec – gateaux aux chômeurs (Unemployment, or dole cake) which is a heavy white cake baked in a thick sauce made of brown sugar, cream and butter. Brown sugar squares (a fudge-like square made with brown sugar, condensed milk and butter) and sugar pie (hmmm, I’m spotting a trend here, a pie made with a brown sugar, cream and butter filling).

We have a huge sweet tooth . We also go through maple syrup like it is going out of style.

sipid (my wife still recoils when I call her cooking thatYou-all, do you reckon we ought to be planning Marty's funeral, in case his wife ever finds out what he posts here about her cooking?

And, shanks--what on earth is tiffin?? I cannot even guess the part of speech! You seem to have used it like a noun, but it sounds like a verb! As in, if you were tiffin, you might have been fightin', but you would have tiffed at school, not to school!

I don't think I have ever referred to food as tiffin, but tiffin trays are sets of pans stacked one on top of the other with a carrying handle slotted down each side. Sorry if that sounds less than coherent but I really must go.

There is also a chocolate bar called Tiffin. Crushed biscuity stuff in chocolate heaven.

If you ever get to see a programme called "Goodness Gracious Me" then watch it! A healthy dose of irony from second (or third or fourth) generation British Asians (forgive me if the terminology has moved on) making fun of their own experience of life. Tiffin, as mentioned by Shanks, is one of those inherently funny words that leads to lots of comedy. I particularly like the scene where they go out for an "English" asking for food that's really "mild" instead of the sterotypical English late night drinkers going out for an "Indian" looking for really hot curry.

I think Goodness Gracious Me is the funniest thing on Brit TV since Absolutely Fabulous. Mr 'Check Please' is one of my favourite characters.

Now back to 'tiffin'. I cannot give you a strict etymology or definition of the word, but I presume that Hobson-Jobson would do the job. My own understanding is as follows.

Tiffin, or a tiffin box, is certainly, as Bingley said, a series of stacked tins for food, with individual handles or otherwise, that can all be bundled together in one unit. If this sounds confusing, think of a cylinder composed of open-topped pans (with lips so one sits neatly on top of the other), and only one lid - for the one on the top. You have two long handles going down the side that, besides allowing you to lift and carry the contraption, also hold it together so none of the individual pans comes tumbling out. With me so far?

The advantage of a tiffin box is that you can carry an entire meal in it, keeping the various dishes separate from each other as you take them to work (or picnic, or school or whatever). The tiffin box, therefore, carries 'tiffin' - your food. Since this entire contraption is used primarily for workers/students, who leave home in the morning after mummy/'the little woman' has cooked and packed lunch, the word 'tiffin' usually refers to your luncheon. It is very Anglo-Indian and British Raj, though it is still used commonly in India today, and I am pretty sure that I have seen it in use amongst other English writers (though I could not, for the life of me, cite one).

This takes us back to the rather elderly expletives thread (deep in the bowels).

Another television programme, I'm afraid. When they made Father Ted they needed to reflect the prevalance of four letter words which begin with f and and with k in everyday Irish speech (see Rubrick's thoughts on the subject). The word needed to be scattered liberally (as an intersifier, rather than having any particular meaning). There were two problems as far as I understand. Firstly there are only so many f***s allowed per hour of viewing for a programme scheduled to go out at around 9pm. Secondly the characters were Catholic priests. The programme makers invented the word "feck" which could be uttered without fear of upsetting too many people (given that the content of the programme was affectionate but not exactly angelic).

The result was, of course, that everyone understood the word feck, so it entered the language in the same way that some of the older hands are able to quote whole sketches from Monty Python.

that is truly a great story, jo; but I'm afraid there's more to it than that. feck really is the root for feckless and feckful and seems to be a Scottish alteration of ME effect. it means either:1a) the greater part: majority b) part, portion <the greater ~ of the year>or2) value, worth <no ~ would come of it>or3) a usu. large number or quantity <a whole ~ of them came>

Spoke to my Irish colleague last night, and she claims to have been using 'feck' (perhaps like the Americans use 'frig', or these days 'frak') as a kind of euphemism for coitus, since before the days of Father Ted, as do many others in Eire. So I suspect the Father ted story, though very tempting, is not likely to be the right one.

I head it in an interview with the producer, so perhaps he was over keen to claim the word. It looks like it still hasn't made it into any of tsuwm's dictionaries, I'll see if it's in any of the on-line ones.

Disclaimer: Wordsmith.org is not responsible for views expressed on this site.
Use of this forum is at your own risk and liability - you agree to
hold Wordsmith.org and its associates harmless as a condition of using it.